patrick somerville

The older one says: “Have you ever heard of a man named Bartolomé de Las Casas?”

The other says: “I don’t think so.”

“Dominican monk named Bartolomé de Las Casas, writing in the sixteenth century, Bartolomé de Las Casas. Okay. No. He was Spanish. He came over to see the New World. And he was totally and immediately fucking horrified by what he saw the soldiers and the conquistadors doing and so he just went right to the notebook and tried to record as many of the atrocities as he could? Just knee-jerk This is what I can do. Someone needs to remember this. Someone needs to see it and remember it and bear witness.READ MORE >

1. Super thrilled to hear via twitter that Coffee House Press will be putting out a new collection by Brian Evenson, Windeye. Hopefully by 2011? No date word yet, but Evenson is the kind that I go stand in line for. If you haven’t read the titular story yet, it is gorgeous, and available via PEN America.

6. At Ubu, Doug Nufer’s Never Again, a 163 pg. novel with no word appearing more than once, which I discovered after an awesome conversation wondering if such a thing existed with Heather Christle and Christopher DeWeese, both of whom have books coming from Octopus in 2011 that I am also mega excited for.

(which was just announced as a Featherproof title I think yesterday, on the heels of his smash The Cradle, and while you’re at it, take a look at the covers for Christian Tebordo’s The Awful Possibilities and Lindsay Hunter’s Daddy’s, (Daddy’s? wow), which are both also damn beautiful and exiting)